Facebook pay-per-click advertising is becoming more mainstream and effective as more brands leverage the platform to increase awareness, leads, and sales. The Facebook Ads platform — revamped to mirror other paid advertising platforms — offers several ad units and targeting options that can expand your online advertising reach. While conversion tracking remains weaker than traditional PPC advertising such as Google AdWords, the various ways to reach prospects and engage with customers are very robust.

Choosing a Facebook Advertising Objective

When launching a new ad campaign in Facebook, you are first taken to a screen (see Figure 1) which outlines the various objectives, categorized by a general objective, and followed by a more specific objective that will determine the ad units that you can use.

Figure 1: When setting up a new ad campaign in Facebook, the options provided are based on different objectives you may have for launching a campaign.

Awareness – This set of ad options is intended to drive brand awareness for your business, and includes the ability to promote an event, boost individual posts you make on your company page, or simply promote your company page to the targeted audience you choose. It is useful for such things as:

Promoting your non-profit fundraising event

Promoting your company to customers who live or are otherwise nearby your storefront

Reaching people more likely to pay attention to your ads and increase awareness for your brand

Connecting more people with your company page

Consideration – This set of ad options is geared towards identifying and targeting potential customers for your business or organization, and it allows you to:

Timely coupons, discounts or other deals for people to claim in your store (online or off)

Ads that get people to take valuable actions on your website, such as signing up for a demo or making a purchase

Ads that get more people to use your Facebook or mobile app

Facebook Targeting Options

Facebook allows you to target any type of audience you want, and the options range from very broad to very specific. For example, let’s say you already have an audience of people you want your ads to reach. You can either upload a list of existing customers exported from your system, which Facebook will match to corresponding users, or you can create lists based on people who engage with your website or Facebook page content (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Facebook lets you create an audience who will see your ads. You can either upload a list of email addresses, which Facebook will match with corresponding user accounts, create a list of people who you know visit your website, create a list of your app users, or generate a list of people Facebook knows have engaged with your page’s content.

Conversely, let’s say you do not have an audience of potential customers, but want to let Facebook find one for you. The criteria with which you can create an audience include:

Location

Age

Gender

Language

Demographics

Interest

Behavior

Excluded Behaviors

In this way, you can narrow your reach by both incorporating known criteria and/or excluding certain types of people who may not match your standard customer profile (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: When creating a new audience, you are given several options to narrow down the criteria by which your ads reach a potential audience, including targeting by location, age, gender, etc.

Sample Facebook Ads

Chances are, if you browse Facebook on a regular basis, you will have encountered one of the various ad units that advertisers have at their disposal. This is because your personal settings help Facebook populate advertiser’s potential audiences.

Figure 4: Above, see an example of a standard ad unit – 1200×628 – promoting a message (or product), and including expanded messaging atop the image, as well as a coupon code and call to action button below. The ad to the right is a “carousel” ad, which cycles various pictures, allowing users to scroll through potential offers. Both appear in user’s Newsfeeds.

Figure 5: This ad appears in the right side panel of Facebook.

Figure 6: This ad appears on Instagram, which is one of the syndication options when launching a campaign on Facebook.

Figure 7: This is a promoted video ad, appearing in a user’s newsfeed.

Conversion Tracking

Unfortunately, conversion tracking on Facebook lags behind the accuracy of pay-per-click platforms such as Google AdWords. So, while user engagement of your ads that occurs on Facebook itself is very accurate, user actions taken on your website will simply be less than accurate for a variety of reasons. For one, people who see your ads on Facebook, but don’t click them, then go on to your website via other means, cannot be tracked by the Facebook pixel. Therefore, your ad would not get “credit” for contributing to the lead or purchase.

OpenMoves has a proprietary method for more accurately monitoring conversion actions taken on your website. Contact us for help launching paid advertising campaigns on Facebook.

A Few Valuable Facebook Statistics

Worldwide, there are over 1.65 billion monthly active Facebook users (MAUs) which is a 15% increase year over year. (Source: Facebook as of 4/27/16) – This means that whether you are a B2B or B2C business, Facebook is too big to ignore! 1.09 billion people log onto Facebook daily (3/16), which represents a 16% increase year over year (Source: Facebook as 4/27/16) – Facebook is not a fad and your clients and prospects are on it daily.

On average, Like and Share Buttons are viewed across almost 10 million websites daily. (Source: Facebook as of 10/2/2014)

Facebook users are 76% female and 66% male.

Average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes. Make your impression with relevant and interesting information.